 Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming along to this CCH seminar. Our speaker today is Christina Bilbaum, who joined USQ in April this year. And she is a member of the new School of Agriculture and Environmental Science. May I say that this is kind of introductory seminar from you? You are talking about your career and your research. And this will be a nice introduction to CCH and also to people on Zoom. Hello, everyone on Zoom. We have certain participants who joined this meeting. The seminar will be recorded. And hopefully, it will be available on Open Land Pathology website. Christina, over to you. Thank you. So do I need to do anything else here? No, it just started. I don't know, but you can just start. OK, no worries. All right, thank you, Levy. And hello, people in the room and people on Zoom. Thanks for joining us on this cold Friday morning. Yes, so first of all, thank you for the introduction and invitation to come and talk today here. Yes, so my name is Christina. And I'm a lecturer at the school. And today, as Levy said, I will give a very brief overview of my past research and current research and so forth. So the title of my talk is, as you can see on the slides, Understanding Planned Micropsoil Interactions to Improve Planned Conservation and Restoration Outcomes. All right, hopefully, this will work. OK, so since some news, Levy said to USQ and CCH, I thought I'll provide a brief snapshot of my past. So you might have guessed my accent is not Australian or anything else. I'm actually from Estonia originally. Case people's geography is a bit for that part of the world. That's where Estonia is. And I actually moved to Sydney to do my PhD at Macquarie University with Michelle Leishman. So I did my PhD there, finished it in 2013. Then I went to Perth, Western Australia, where I did my first post-doc with Neil and Wright and Joe Fontaine. And after that, I went to Louisiana, where I did my post-doc with Emily Farr at Tulane University. Then I had a, I'm not going to call it a break, but I was on maternity leave for two years, roughly, before I joined Deakin and RMIT universities in Melbourne. And now I'm here, USQ, since April 4. And I guess I can just briefly also say, so my background is broadly plant ecology or plant invasion ecology. And then during my PhD, I really got into the below-ground microbial ecology, focusing predominantly on the mutualistic microbes. I'm also associated editor in plant ecology, a peer review journal. And in 2016 or 17, together with my colleague, Eleonora Gidi from Western Sydney, we co-founded this ecological site of Australia, Plant Soil Ecology Research Chapter, that basically the aim of this was to bring together people from various tracts of life and expertise, but who work in Australia and plant microbial interactions to basically support each other, network, create events at the conferences, the ESA annual conferences. And also we have a few online activities as well. So we're on Twitter a lot. And that's where we share information knowledge workshop. It obviously has an ecological angle, but we all tend to work on different things like ecology and agriculture and agro-ecosystems. So I think there's something for everyone. At USQ, I'm now, as I said, lecturer, but also major convener for ecology and conservation. So that's a snapshot of me very quickly. I always find when I start in a new place, it's good to add a fun fact about myself. This is not quite myself. This is a fungi, but I thought it's really cool. A couple of years ago, I discovered that there's a fungi, leuco-coprinus burnbalmia, that has the same species name than my last name. And it's just an interesting backstory. So it's apparently was named by a garden inspector in Prague, which is in Czech Republic, who had the same last name like I do. I'm not sure if we're related, but I probably should dig in and see. Obviously we both love fungi and microbes and that sort of stuff. So a few things about the fungi that I related that they don't like cold weather. I absolutely hate it. So handsome here, they like to be in tropics and subtropics. I haven't actually seen this fungi yet. So not that I'm in the right climatic zone or might go and forage for them to get a photo together with us for the next talk. So that's the fun part. Okay. So now to the science. So I saw this cover. This is the science magazine cover from May, from last month. And it was all about the systemic microbiome and how microbial communities affect humans. But it really talked to me because this sort of description of that, I guess, special issue or this special theme in science is about how humans are many distinct and interconnecting microbial populations that exert systemic effects throughout their body. And so understanding those ways, the ways these microbial communities interact provides a really good insight into how the collective microbiome shapes the health and the disease. And you wonder why am I talking about human microbiomes if we're actually talking about plant soil? But this is just really to kind of help you understand how I view the role of microbes in plant health because I really do the thing that there's a lot of overlaps and exactly the same mechanism working for humans because we all know that now gut microbiome affects our health, our weight, our likelihood of getting diseases and I feel that plants is the same thing. So that's why I put it up there. So just a brief outline on my talk today. So I'll start off with talking why soil microbes are important which is a little bit like preaching to the choir because I'm pretty sure everyone, we're all on the same page but nevertheless for people maybe on Zoom from various backgrounds. Then I'll talk a little bit about the utility of plants or feedbacks. Then the role of soil microbes in plant invasions with some examples from my work and our collective work. And then the role of soil microbes also in restoration ecology. And then I'll finish off by giving just a quick snapshot of my current research. Okay, so obviously I think we all can agree that on all these aspects of the benefits that soil microbes provide to the soil and the plants by obviously being the key players in decomposition, humus formation, nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation via specifically legumes and rhizobia by degradation, soil structure, the disease and pest control and growth promotion. So I would say these are probably the key functions that the soil microorganisms serve at least for me as a new plant ecologist that we are very keen to explore and understand. So I'll start off with the plants or feedback and why it's very, has been very useful in ecology since late nineties, early 2000s to really understand what's happening below ground. So just a quick question. How many people know plants or feedback sort of make, I guess the idea of it? You're all familiar, yeah? Who has heard of it before? Hands up. Three people in the room, okay. This is another lecture so I'm not gonna chat ask the Zoom people, but okay, raise hand. Okay, Catherine, okay, so four people out of 20. Okay, cool. Well, this slide then serves its purpose because it's quite detailed to explain why we're using plants or feedbacks. So obviously in late nineties, early 2000s as the technological advances really allowed us to start doing basic sequencing and kind of move past the culturing, we started to really be able to see what is actually happening below ground with plants. And so in ecology, this plant soil feedback approach has been very, very widely used and has really helped us understand some of the patterns positive and negative of the below ground soil communities on plants. And so what it essentially is, is that you have your two stages in that experiment. So you have what's called the conditioning phase and you have your testing phase. And so you have your say species A and you have your species B. And so what happens during the conditioning phase is that there is this species specific interactions with microbes that generally result in the divergence of soil microbial communities. And so in the figure at the bottom part of the testing the alpha and beta of the soil for the soil communities. And then in the testing phase, what you're doing is you're just growing them species A in again in its own soil. So for example, in the conditioning phase, you split that soil same half, half of that soil you use again to grow species A again. And the other half you use to grow the other species that you're interested in to grow in that soil. And then at the end of the testing phase, you then compare how did the species A perform in its own soil relative when it was grown in the other species soil. So you do that sort of kind of cross comparison. There's many other ways now that you can sort of do those plant soil feedback, but this was to sort of the start, how it started like different people do it a bit differently. But this is the sort of basic of it. And at the end we can then say, we can estimate the effect size and the biomass differences between when the plant is grown in its own soil as opposed to in the soil of other species. And then we end up with those two sort of groups of responses we can call positive plant soil feedback. And positive plant soil feedback basically means that species A grew much better in species A soil as opposed to in the soil of other plants. So this would be a positive plant soil feedback. And in a sort of plant ecology context, that really actually results in reduced plant community diversity because if all the species support their own growth in the soil and the growth of the propagals, there'll be a reduction in species diversity because one species can become really dominant. And that's what happens with invasive species a lot. As opposed to the positive feedback, there's the negative plant soil feedback. And this is where if species A is grown in its own soil, it's actually will perform worse than when it's grown in the soil of other plant species. And that's a negative feedback. And so in plant community context, this will result in increased plant community diversity because usually what happens there, the mechanism is that the plants accumulate pathogen, petrified pathogens in the soil that then limit their propagate of establishment and growth nearby that hosts them like mother plant. So this is a bit related to this Janssen-Connell hypothesis of species coexistence. So this is the sort of snapshot of plant soil feedbacks. And I've used this sort of framework a lot in my work and my PhD specifically. And so this field, I guess I can say, really boomed in early 2000s. And this paper was sort of considered like a landmark paper by John Cleronomas. I was fortunate enough during my PhD to actually go to his lab in Guelph and actually learn about the plant soil feedback process. So this was really valuable for me. But yeah, he published this landmark study where he compared five invasive species and five rare species in Canada. And then he did that exact plant soil feedback experiment where he grew the invasive species in their own soil and in the soil of other species and the same for rare species. And so what he found essentially, so on the y-axis you have the growth of plants, so relative growth of plants in their own soil compared to others. And if the bars are above zero, that's a positive plant soil feedback. And if they are below, that's a negative plant soil feedback. And so this really neatly showed exactly what I was just telling before is that the invasive species generally have a positive plant soil feedback. So they are doing really well in their own soil. And that's why you often see those monocultures of one invader, whereas the rare species, potentially why they are rare is this mechanism is that they in their soils sort of self-control their distribution, which is essentially detrimental to them, but it really kind of explained in a new way why some species are rare and why some species are abundant. And that was to do with those microbial communities below ground. So I was thinking since we have a mix of people who studied more natural ecosystems and who are more interested in agricultural ecosystem. There's this great paper by Marriott et al from 2018 published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution where he, being a mostly ethnic ecologist, he tried to merge and explain the utility of the plant soil feedback in agricultural systems as well that it could be used and what we can learn from each other, so to speak. And so this is just an overview of what sort of expectations would we have for plant soil feedbacks in natural systems. So usually in natural systems, we have high species diversity. The plant soil feedbacks are generally, they could be either or negative or positive. There's a high species and trade diversity. The nutrient cycle is generally closed. The soil biota is really diverse because you have those different species interacting and there's quite complex soil traffic interactions as well. And so just on this figure, the red lines indicate negative, plant soil feedback, the blue lines indicate positive, plant soil feedback and the circles are just mutualists and the triangles are the pathogens. So it's just illustrative. Whereas in agricultural systems, obviously we have mostly monoculture because that's the species of interest that we're growing. Often there's the external resource inputs in terms of like fertilizers. The soil biota tends to become less diverse over time as the soil is exhausted and the traffic interactions are quite simplified generally. However, again, this is a figure from his paper. I really liked how he showed that, in agricultural systems, we can learn to harness what we know from natural systems to make the agricultural output more efficient. And so there's just three different pathways that they were proposing is that, for example, number one, optimizing propping systems. So if we understand better in the natural ecosystems, for example, species, beneficial species interactions, we can harness that to then kind of apply it in the cropping systems as well, where we select for those microbial communities like rhizobia or specific rhizobia species too, enhance the crop species growth. Another thing is also, number two is the disease resistance and pest control. So this is just, for example, in terms of above ground, knowing what we know about different species below ground root traits and how different root traits are related to more efficient or less efficient nutrient and water acquisition strategies. If we can harness that and either genetically modify or breed species selectively that have those root traits that have been shown in the natural ecosystems to be really beneficial, then again, we could improve our cropping outcomes. The inoculation pathway there at the bottom is just again to select from microbial communities that would provide better resistance to pathogens and pests. And then the last one, number three here is increasing the resource use efficiency. So it's basically all about, in the cropping systems we have that one species, but if we can kind of figure out the interactions and pairing of different cropping and intercropping species that would contribute to bigger litter imports, more nutritious litter that then can be recycled by the crop species to contribute to nutrient retention and recycling and acquisition as well. So these are just very generic and they're very theoretical. I know you might ask how can we actually apply this? But this is I think would sort of pathways to think how we can learn from sort of each other. I like that they also provided the reverse picture how you can use the agricultural knowledge that we have already from cultural sciences to improve conservation and restoration. And I think that's really neat, I really like it because we're all interconnected, agriculture is in the environment obviously and the environment can support agriculture. So in this case, they were proposing, for example, what we can learn from cropping systems is that obviously, number one, the seafaring those complex plant-soil interactions. So obviously in cropping systems, we have that monoculture, lower below ground diversity where we can really see what plant above and below ground compartments work best together. And knowing that, which is essentially like in a glass house as well, we have that one species we can then engineer almost those perfect plant-soil interactions and also inoculating more mutualistic organisms to promote, for example, species that are rare and then suppress the species that are dominant already, for example, in conservation. The point number two here is understanding better restoration after disturbance. And it's really sort of again understanding those sort of single species interactions between plants and microbes to then, for example, inoculate some field sites where there's a lot of invasive species with pathogens to then control their distribution and again, support more rare species or foundational species, especially after disturbance where the soil is really basically devoid of any beneficial microbes and so on and so forth. So I think you're getting the idea and the last one is the multifunctionality. So I guess the point of me showing those three slides from this paper is just I like how they show this complementarity between the different systems. So I think this, for me, especially moving forward and trying to find, you know, research ways and continuing here at CCH as well. So this is a useful, I think, kind of framework. Okay, so now I'll get more towards my past research. So as I said, I sort of started doing plant invasion ecology. And so using that plant soil feedback mechanism understanding, so in invasion it has been widely used and basically this is again, like more of a conceptual diagram, but basically what it shows is that imagine a native range of forests, right? That's undisturbed. So you have your species diversity, you have some spruces, you have some other trees and generally in those sort of undisturbed Zika systems. So here you have those two species and you have those arrows showing the interactions between species. And generally what happens is that plants experience this negative plant soil feedback and that's what keeps them in check and the different species can coexist. However, if there's a successful invasion that for example, in our case here spruce, it then starts to dominate and it's getting that positive plant soil feedback as shown on the plus here under the spruce. So it has a positive plant soil feedback with itself but it's also benefits from the soil microbial communities of other species. So in that case, the native species are getting suppressed because they're still experiencing that negative feedback whereas the invasive species continue to spread. And obviously in the case of unsuccessful invasion these patterns would be reversed, right? So one of the key questions in ecology is like why some species become invasive and some don't. There's many different mechanisms there but yeah and we can dissect it later but if we look at the whole soil communities then a lot can be explained by looking at these sort of interactions. So this is the sort of framework for specifically invasion ecology. So taking that all in mind, so there's yes, one table from 2006, it's a bit old but it really summarized a lot of different invasive species experiments. And so basically this table just shows the some of the main species that have been looked at by invasion ecologist and then tested in the glass house those feedback effects. And you can see if it's a, there's either effect of the soil biota in the native range effect of soil biota in a non-native range and whether there is a biogeographical effect. And that basically means that there is a differential response to the soil microbes. And you can see that for most species there's variable effect, but often it's a positive plant soil feedback. So that's what this sort of shows. So for my PhD, I studied legumes, acacia species. And so because we knew all that information how plants or feedback explain species distribution we really wanted to apply that in Australia for acacias. So acacias are really, they're native to Australia but they have become big problematic invaders in most of the Mediterranean regions of the world. So California, Chile, Italy and Spain, South Africa and also New Zealand. But the funny thing about acacias is, is that because there's over 1000 species of them some of them are actually native to the Eastern States of Australia and some of them are actually unique to the Western Australia. But because Australia is a continent country people just think it's native here so it's fine but there's actually some problems with some of the species that are native in Eastern States in Western Australia and vice versa. So we wanted to understand how much then the soils contribute to these patterns that we see. So we had four acacias, acacias ligna, acacia longifolia, acacia cyclops and acacia longifolia. And one of the close relative of legumes, Paracirantes la Fanta. And so what we did is that I was very fortunate for my PhD. I got to travel all the Eastern States and the Western Australia to collect some plant and soil from several populations of each species and then bring it back to Sydney to do that plant soil feedback experiment with more than 1000 pots to test for these effects. And so let's have a look, what did I find? Well, so this is just results from our papers. So basically when we performed that plant soil feedback experiment like I showed you before. So we have our five species on the y-axis, you have the total biomass and on the x-axis you have the soil origin and M stands for native and I stands for invasive range. And so basically what we did is that for example for acacia cyclops, I grew it in its native soil and then in its non-native soil but the difference was I also collected seed material not just soil. And so the above letters would also, these are the seed origin of the species. It gets a little bit complicated, I'm sorry, but it's basically as we have the seed and soil and we test it for both. And surprisingly what we found is that there was no effect of the soil at all on this species. So they performed equally well in both but actually it was the seed origin. So the above ground plant traits that explained the variation in the biomass. So that was really interesting and it was exactly contrary to what we expected. And yeah, so that was the sort of the main message from this work. And there was a, yeah, the significant effect of seed origin specifically for two species, acacia cyclops and something now. And so we published that and then we also looked at the specifically the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. So since they're legumes, febacy, they do rely a lot on their rhizobia and other nitrogen-fixing bacteria to really establish and growth in those early stages. So we had a look at that and we did some tear-off LP analysis for more community. And then we did some sequencing as well, both for the nitrogen-fixing bacteria and the fungi. And so what we found generally that there was no difference in what microbial communities were in their soils. And that then explains why the plant soil feedback experiment didn't show that as well. So I thought it would be quite a challenge to publish like negative results because we didn't find the plant soil effect, but we managed. So I got four papers out of the PhD, so I was okay. So I was happy with that. But yeah, so it just provided basically a bit more context and to the plant soil feedback literature, basically showing that these responses are species-specific and they're also geographically different. So it's not all blanket sort of results. So then I continued working on invasive species in Louisiana where I focused on the grass species from Midas Australis. So here's just a picture showing the problem, the extent of the problem of the species. Forms those really dense monocultures in the coastal areas that suppresses the native species diversity and really changes the soil communities as well. And these are just on the map showing our sites, different sites that we have across the salinity gradient, which is just the abiotic filter for the species and could be for the below ground as well. So this is just sort of in summary, the project. And what we found there was that, so we established field sites where we had the monoculture of Fragmites Australis. Then we had the age sort of transect and then we had the native community transect that didn't have the Fragmites Australis. So this was the gradient. And then we sampled soil and roots from all of these three transects. And what these figures here below just basically shows that we found that the root fungal in the sphere composition strongly between Fragmites Australis and the native community. So, and you can see on those PCA figures at the bottom as well is that there was a strong difference by community type, the biotic context for the invasive species. So basically what it means is that Fragmites had really unique microbial communities in the soil compared to the native community. But more interestingly, we found published in this paper that the Fragmites also had a bigger pathogen, fungal pathogen accumulation in its roots compared to the native species. And so this could be, so this was both for roots and the soils. And that really could again explain why it's doing so well. So aside from the fact that it's just really big plant above ground providing all that shade, it has really different root system. And then it also accumulates those pathogens that again, they are not in a separate glass house we showed they are not detrimental to Fragmites itself but they are actually suppressing the native community. And that explains the mechanism why it's so widespread. And such a global problem really it's not just in the US, it's in Europe, it's in Australia as well. So that was really interesting. And that sort of supported the previous research. So that was my postdoc in Tulane. So now I'll move from the invasive species ecology to restoration ecology. So restoration ecology is obviously much more applied field that's sort of fundamental ecology. And it really tries to take that plant microbial knowledge and then apply it to the real world scenarios. So what generally happens during restoration is this is just a schematic figure showing that as the soils get more disturbed there will be more bacteria dominated usually and the fungal communities are reduced. And then restoration ecologists often when you have for example, imagine a mining of sands and mining scenarios. So for example, in Western Australia you have this really biodiverse communities of plants very unique that are cleared up to dig out the soil for the mining industry. And then if you wanna restore that, what do you do? So often restoration ecologists want to take the shortcuts as shown on the red lines. So you wanna kind of bypass the whole succession and get that to the end result to support the plant species you want to grow in restoration. So how do you do that? And so using that plant soil ecology sort of understanding and feedbacks is really one way to kind of get to those shortcuts. There's some work that has really shown so by Liddy Kodetal, 2019 that during ecological restoration when you have those bare disturbed sites what they found is that the soil microbial communities there was a large amount as shown on the red in the red in those pie charts of opportunistic taxa. So these are these taxa that are potentially pathogens. They're not really forming in your relationship with any plants, but they have detrimental effects. And then as you continue with ecological restoration and the species start to reestablish and you get this upper story and under story what they found is that there was an increase in the niche adapted taxa. So this is basically more, and I think it makes sense because as plants start form those relationships mutualistic and different symbiotic relationships with microbes, there's increasing those more specific niche adapted taxa. And so this really shows the utility of ecological restoration and then inform potentially like soil inoculations and those species interactions. And the last figure here is just showing they had Australia white samples. And so in the natural communities they found those as in global those more niche adapted beneficial microbial taxa. And so we, so during my post-doc in at Murdoch Unis so I had a project with in collaboration with industry partners, Tronax where we went to the cool Jalil mine site north of Paris and we collected the soils from there. So what they're doing is that they're doing exactly that sun mining processes where they basically remove the native vegetation they stockpile it somewhere away and then they perform the operations obviously of the mining and then they wanna restore those pits using that vegetation and the stockpile soil that they stripped years ago. But no one really knows that does this work? Will the vegetation actually work? They just assume that based on earlier literature that it might work and the species will regenerate. So we want to actually test that. So what we did is we went and collected those different stockpiles. So we had stockpiles that range from one years old what is it, two, three, five and 10 so 10 year old stockpiles of soils that were just laying there. And we brought them back to the glass house and we used Acacia seligna just as a bio assay species to grow in those soils and see how well the species would actually perform. And it made sense to use Acacia seligna because it's a legume, it's a quite fast growing legume and it's often used in restoration to start the revigitation process. And so what we found is this is from our paper showing the tall above ground and below ground biomass of Acacia seligna. And we also looked at the specific root length, SRL, L nodule biomass, so evidence of rhizobia forming associations with this Acacia seligna and also AMF colonization. And so what we found is that we had, sorry, we had also reference site as marked in gray. So reference site is just adjacent undisturbed soil. And so what we found is that the tall biomass of this Acacia seligna really decreased significantly in those 10 year old soils that's been laying there in those stockpiles. But surprisingly we found that actually the specific root length and AMF colonization in those 10 year old soils, when the plant was growing was really high. And so it seems that the above ground, the plant didn't do very well, but below ground, it was sort of exploring for nutrients and water and potential fungi and bacteria to support this growth. And another thing as well for the nodule biomass, I just want you to see. So the nodule biomass of this Acacia was also the lowest in the 10 year old soils. And we couldn't understand really why. Then we used those soils to do some sequencing. And so we described all the nitrogen fixing bacterial communities and also fungi in a separate paper. And so this is this paper was basically showing the fungal communities in the bottom triangle, pairwise comparisons and bacterial communities in the top triangle in pairwise comparisons. And basically what we found was that both fungal and bacterial richness declined as the stockpile age increased. However, fungi actually sort of gained the compositional structure similar to the reference sites better than bacteria. So this is basically everything that's in those squares, I should have said that everything that's black is significant effect size. And everything that's white is not. So in terms of those pairwise comparisons. And so what we also found is that in the 10 year old soils when we sequenced them, there was no Brady Rhizobium. So there was none of that mutualistic Rhizobium taxa that Seligna needs potentially often associates with to grow really well. And that really nicely complimented our glasshouse results where we found that lower nodule biomass in those 10 year old soils. So this is one way now that we can think that, what is happening in those stockpiles and how to best potentially either inoculate them with microbial taxa to improve those restoration outcomes. Okay. And then a couple of years ago with the Eleonora, we tried to combine some of the studies from Australia who looked at other sort of microbial community research applications to conservation and restoration. So we're putting together a special issue in plant ecology that's available online. If anyone wants to see other case studies and examples how this sort of research has been applied. Okay. So just now jumping to my current research, I'm going pretty long, hey. So some of my current research, there's a lot of things going on. So I won't have time to get through everything. I've added this cropping ecosystems for my future, hopefully research in CCH as well. So the cropping ecosystems, if you're from my web pages, if you actually click on it, it's all about dig up there, which is that project. But yeah, I'm still obviously continuing to work on plant invasions because this is why I got into science. I'm really fascinated about invasions. Plant microbe interactions just more generally. And also during my time at Melbourne, I really got into peatland microbiology and coastal wetland microbiology as well. So I'll just show briefly what I've been working before I came to USQ. So I really got into the peatland microbiology because peatlands are really important. They cover obviously only 3% of the world's land area, but they store a staggering amount of carbon. And added to that, they also play a really important role in global carbon cycling as they contain more organic carbon than actually any other terrestrial ecosystem. And we have a lot of research on microbial communities of peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere. But we're now surprisingly little, at least I know if anyone knows, let me know. But on the peatland microbiology in Australia and also Indonesia, which have, like especially Indonesia has a lot of peatlands. And so this is why what informs our research or motivates our research. And so for my previous position, so we collaborated with Jamie Lamid, who is in USA in Syracuse University. And so he started this global project of sampling microbial communities from peatlands around the world. And we had a site in the Australian Alps in Victoria where we also looked at some of the intact peatlands and some of the degraded peatlands. And I guess I forgot to mention that peatlands, why are they important is because they're facing from climate change and from anthropogenic disturbances, very rapid degradation, but because they store so much carbon, if they get degraded, more of that carbon will be released in the atmosphere. And so understanding the microbial processes there might also help in peatland restoration in the future. So we have one paper now that's in review, but it's available as a pre-print as well, where we basically found that peatland degradation reduced microbial richness and it altered the microbial functions in a way that we found that the disturbed peatland had higher composition of subterotrophic fungi and pathogenic fungi as well than the natural peatlands. So this was the outcome of that research. And then the last example with Blue Carbon Lab at Deakin University, they studied predominantly the Blue Carbon Ecosystems, which are really those mangrove salt martian seagrass ecosystems. You might have seen recently in ABC there was this article about the biggest plant in the world that was found off the coast of Western Australia, which is an actual seagrass, one big seagrass. Which is pretty cool. But this research is basically informed or the aim of this research is that, so we know that Blue Carbon Ecosystems store a lot of carbon and most of the research has been on the sort of trying to quantify how much carbon they store. But we don't really know about the quality and stability of that carbon. So also again, with climate change and the coastal degradation, how much of that carbon will be released and what really controls its release. So basically how much of sort of recalcitrant and label carbon is there. And so the future challenge is really to understand what controls that formation of that Blue Carbon. And this all builds up on the work of Peter McCready that I can take no credit at all for. But my role came in where I proposed to actually look at doing a global synthesis of who is, what microbes are in those coastal ecosystems. So we don't know any, like we sort of know, but we don't have like a clear picture or like a review understanding what dominates those coastal micro, what dominates those coastal ecosystems in terms of microbial communities. And so what I'm still working on now is conducting that systemic, systematic review, maybe meta-analysis and understanding who is where. So basically ID them first and then also then assign them functions and understand what are they actually performing in those coastal ecosystems. So this is some of the ongoing work we're doing. Okay, so we made a full circle. I'll come back to that first slide. And so again, I just want to sort of reiterate what I just said at the beginning in terms of how I and a lot of other, I think plants are the colleges view microbes. So if we just replace humans with plants, we'll get this exact things that apply to basically humans applied to plants. So microbes keep us healthy. They protect us from pests. So that's why we need to study them and we need more funding to study them because they do really drive all of these processes in ecosystems. So that's why I put it back there and just replaced humans with plants and added outside the body of plant body as well. Okay, I'm tired. So this was my talk and obviously there's a lot of people I need to thank who without all of this research would not have been possible. The funders and the universities and scholarships and so forth and so on. Thank you so much for your attention. I'm really sorry that it's been like 15 minutes talk. So I hope you don't hate me now. Cheers, that's all. Thank you so much. I think we stopped recording and there's no time limit. Okay, thanks very much. Very good introduction. I have many questions.